Particularly as integration of assistance functions that are intended to take the load off the driver when driving a vehicle increases, the complexity of systems in modern motor vehicles mounts. Provision of these functions requires a growing number of components, such as sensors, all of which results in an increased volume of information inside and/or outside the vehicle and in extensive interrelationships. Problems that arise therefrom are those of ensuring fail-safety as the complexity of the systems grows, the increasing system and integration costs, the quality demands to be met, increasing product introduction times and production times per vehicle, for example. These frequently involve the use of modern multicore microcontroller systems that implement a master/slave communication concept. The master entities in this case include CPU systems, direct memory access (DMA) modules and intelligent peripheral modules such as FlexRay, Ethernet and Inter-Processor Link. Ordinary peripheral resources act as slave entities in this case.
EP 1 456 720 B1 describes a multicore redundant control computer system for safety-critical applications that comprises a plurality of computer blocks, wherein each computer block in turn has a multicore redundant control computer system having at least two control computers. The control computers are each equipped with a computation core having semi-redundant or fully redundant peripheral elements and semi-redundant or fully redundant memory elements and are connected to an arbitration unit that monitors the control computers for malfunctions and can couple or decouple them from a vehicle data bus by means of a communication controller that is provided for this purpose.
DE 10 2011 007 467 A1 describes a multicore integrated microprocessor circuit that has a main processor structure and a secondary processor structure, wherein at least the main processor structure is of redundant-core design and executes essentially only safety-critical programs, while the secondary processor structure executes essentially non-safety-critical programs. The main processor structure checks the secondary processor structure for correct operation. In this case, the two processor structures access memory areas that are exclusively associated with each of them, with data interchange being able to take place by means of a shared memory area. In addition, independent and inherently different operating systems are executed on the two processor structures.
The software modules, which are frequently provided by the motor vehicle manufacturers, in particular, or are individualized for said motor vehicle manufacturers, have an increasing need for resources in modern motor vehicle controllers. This makes the integration of software modules that are becoming more extensive increasingly uneconomical, since they need to be merged with the basic software that, by way of example, is provided by a supplier. Customization of all of the software to suit new or extended hardware is correspondingly sophisticated.